At the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, three well-known scholars of composition led a discussion on a writing exercise they'd assigned themselves. Each wrote for an hour a day for a 30-day month on an everyday object, a consciousness-raising activity that revealed much about the the objects examined and the writers themselves. We've taken it upon ourselves to replicate this exercise and record the results here.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Highway mileage sign

It had been a long weekend. A Jimmy Buffett concert came to be jokingly
referred to as “the double date from hell” as my college roommate Amy and I
ended up attending it with our ex-boyfriends.
We were all friends. We had
bought the tickets months before, and when things ended on good enough terms,
we decided we were mature enough to all have fun together.

The concert turned into a thunderstorm, the
stadium transformed into a giant mud puddle, and our “dates” morphed into
drunken buffoons. When my ex finally
made his way back to the car hours after the thunderstorm and concert had
ended, he was covered and caked in mud.
His only explanation was a slurred, “Some hippies threw me down a
hill.”

The night only got worse when our “dates”
ended up taking off their clothes – mine because he couldn’t get in the car
with all of that mud and Amy’s because “if he gets to be naked, then I want to be
also.” Amy and I ended up in tears. Who
wants to be in a cold car after a lousy concert with two drunk, smelly, and
unclothed college guys? Our breaking
point came when they refused to put their clothes back on.

The next day, on our way home from Raleigh to
Greenville, Amy was determined to salvage some aspect of the weekend. Always finding the sunny side of things, she
said, “Let’s stop and take a picture with the highway mileage sign you always
giggle at!” I grumbled a non-reply, and
she pulled the car over to the side of the road.